To make sense of information, humans tend to organize the information that they manage into categories. Once organized into categories, humans can locate specific pieces of information more quickly by first identifying the category to which the information belongs, and then searching through the information that has been assigned to that category.
The categorization schemes that people use to organize their information may vary significantly from person to person. For example, some people may use a single-tier categorization scheme. Other people may use a more complex, hierarchical categorization scheme in which “parent” categories may have one or more “child” categories. Likewise, some categorization schemes may be coarse-grained (resulting in relatively few categories with relatively many members) or fine-grained (resulting in relatively more categories with relatively fewer members).
In a variety of contexts, it is useful to organize into a single unified categorization scheme (the “target” scheme) information that comes from many sources. For example, it is becoming increasingly common for shoppers to search for the particular product in which they are interested using electronic search mechanisms, such as Internet-based search engines. As used herein, the term “product” refers to any form of sellable unit, including services, intangibles, and physical and software products. The complex systems used by such electronic search mechanisms to process incoming product data from multiple merchants, and deliver that product data in the form of search results to millions of customers, must ensure that customers receive the best information available.
In order to do this, data that represents an offer to sell a particular product by a particular party, referred to herein as “product offering information”, must be obtained for multiple product offerings. Once obtained, the product offering information is categorized. In this example, the categorization scheme used by the search engine is the “target scheme”.
There may be a variety of reasons to organize into a single target scheme information obtained from multiple sources. For example, in the context of a search engine, the product information may be categorized in order to, among other things, determine how much merchants associated with the product offerings are charged for inclusion of the product offerings in the corresponding search mechanism. Merchants are often charged a certain amount of money by the search engine owner every time a product of the merchant is selected by a user of the search mechanism—a cost-per-click (CPC) charge.
In many contexts, the sources from which information is obtained may have their own categorization schemes (“source schemes”). For example, some or all of the merchants from whom a search engine obtains product offering information may their own scheme for categorizing their products.
When a target scheme is used to organize information from many sources, the fact that some or all of information has already been categorized in a source scheme has not been particularly helpful to the party responsible for organizing the information into the target scheme. The usefulness of the source scheme information is diminished due to the differences between the source scheme and the target scheme, and between the source scheme and the other source schemes that are feeding into the same target scheme. The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.